Want to create Norway's best digital customer experience

Together with Norsk Tipping's own IT department, Cegal and Oracle ensure that there is never downtime when you hand in the game coupon or receive the Flax win.

Norsk Tipping wants to create Norway's best digital customer experience.

Imagine that you have to hand in the Lotto coupon at 17:55 on a Saturday with your usual number range, but it doesn't work because Norsk Tipping's IT system is down. You can't bet on your numbers - and this particular Saturday they were going to collect the million winnings.

Such a scenario is of course not something that Norsk Tipping's customers should have to experience. On the contrary. The goal of the state-owned gaming company is to create Norway's best digital customer experience. Then the IT systems must always be available – every minute, every day, all year round. And they should definitely be up when there is the most traffic: the peaks come when it is the deadline to submit Vikinglotto on Wednesdays and Lotto draw on Saturdays with up to 3,000 transactions per. Sec.

Together with Norsk Tipping's own IT department Cegal and Oracle are the technology partners who ensure that Norsk Tipping's critical IT platform always works.

Large amounts of data

• Over 350 different games
• 2.1 million customers
• 46 billion in annual turnover including profits that are reinvested in new games
• 6.1 billion in profit that went to good causes in 2020
• 2.5 billion sales transactions per. year
• 80 percent of the games are made digitally

Every week, more than one million customers play at Norsk Tipping. Cegal helps ensure that the IT platform always works.

Every week, more than one million customers play at least one of Norsk Tipping's games. Be it Lotto, Joker, Tipping, KongKasino, Belago, Eurojackpot or any other of the gambling company's many different games in different channels.

Another important figure is the annual turnover of NOK 46 billion. This number also includes the winnings wagered on new games.

For IT, the figure NOK 46 billion is important. It tells us about the amount of transactions we have to handle.
Tormod Kvalheim, Norsk Tipping

Technology partner for seven years

Norsk Tipping has worked with Cegal since 2016. The first project Cegal assisted with was moving Norsk Tipping's Oracle infrastructure and databases to the first generation of Oracle Exadata Cloud in Norsk Tipping's private Oracle cloud in Hamar – also called Cloud @ Customer.

In connection with the Oracle Early Renewal Program, Norsk Tipping, with the help of Cegal's Oracle experts, has moved databases and infrastructure from the first generation to the second generation of Exadata Cloud@Customer. More specifically: from Oracle Server X6-2 to Oracle Exadata Machine X8M.

- Generation 1 gave us some challenges. Upgrades were cumbersome and often involved night work. The solution was less flexible, it was complicated to separate production from test environments and the user interface in the administration tool seemed unfinished, says Tormod Kvalheim, Head of Application at Norsk Tipping.

After the transition to generation 2 of Oracle Cloud, Norsk Tipping's Oracle solution is more stable, performance and capacity are higher, and flexibility increases.

We had great help from Cegal when we moved to Cloud@Customer in 2016 and we have had great help with the upgrade to generation 2 now. We need an IT partner with good experience from similar complex projects at other companies. We get that with Cegal, says Kvalheim.

He describes some of the benefits of the second-generation Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI):

• It is much easier to register service requests
• Upgrades take place without Norsk Tipping being involved and times can be easily set via the administration tool.
• It's easy to scale up and down and you can scale all the way down to zero CPU usage. This means that Norsk Tipping is not invoiced either.
• Much easier to create new VM clusters than before.
• Possibility of more automation and automatic scaling as needed.